Article by George Norman

On 02 Feb 2009

Getting to understand what someone else is talking about is becoming less of a hassle, especially with free translation services such as Google Translate. I will admit that machine generated translations are not exactly 100% accurate, and the BlahblahFish webpage is proof of what happens when translations go wrong, but it is also true that using Google Translate in Mozilla Firefox is one of the fastest means of addressing your translation needs.

Google has recently announced that it provides translation support for 7 more languages: Albanian, Estonian, Galician, Hungarian, Maltese, Thai and Turkish. These 7 come to complete the long list of languages Google Translate supports: Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.


The other change that Google announced is in relation to the English dictionary which has been enhanced as well and now can provide synonyms, antonyms, pronunciations, detailed definitions and examples from Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary.

If you do not particularly fancy using Google Translate in your browser window, there are two options at your disposal. The first one is to continue using the service’s functionality by transforming it into a standalone application with Fried Babelfish. The other would be to use a virtual dictionary such as Ultimate Dictionary 1.0 which combines more than 30 different dictionaries in one software application.

Ultimate Dictionary 1.0 is free to download, and even though it weighs in at more than 150MB, the wait is worth it. The user interface is not cluttered with things you do not need; its minimalist display presents you with a list of dictionaries on the left side and a list of definitions/translations to the right hand side. If you enable the “Scan” feature you will get a pop-up definition for whatever word you hover your mouse over. The only downside I can see is that you cannot add custom dictionaries or additional dictionaries; you are limited to the 30+ selection the developer included in the software.

If you would like to get Ultimate Dictionary 1.0, a download location is available here.



Tags: Google, Google Translate, Ultimate Dictionary

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